Archive for the ‘Movies’ Category

Filmed in black and white, the horror romance film A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night is a gorgeous movie, managing to be both ominous and wonderfully sweet. It tells the story of a vampire “who preys on men who disrespect women.” The director, Ana Lily Amirpour, is Iranian-American, and the movie is spoken in Persian with English subtitles. Amirpour describes her film as “Iranian Vampire Spaghetti Western,” and it is, sort of, but it’s also so simple and beautiful it’s far more than that snarky description.

Marketed as “the German Brokeback Mountain,” Free Fall depicts a complicated romance between two police officers. Be warned, the ending is unclear, but the story itself spools out well, building up the tension and the conflict of the lead character. It’s available for streaming on Netflix (and one of its leads also stars in the Netflix-streaming Sense8).

In Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte created two incredibly memorable characters. The titular Jane is “poor, plain, and little,” but she is also the most stubborn heroine ever, and knows her own worth: “I can live alone, if self-respect, and circumstances require me so to do. I need not sell my soul to buy bliss. I have an inward treasure born with me, which can keep me alive if all extraneous delights should be withheld, or offered only at a price I cannot afford to give.”

Her foil, her true soulmate, is the irascible Mr. Rochester, whom Jane describes as having “broad and jetty eyebrows; his square forehead, made squarer by the horizontal sweep of his black hair. I recognized his decisive nose, more remarkable for character than beauty; his full nostrils, denoting, I thought, choler; his grim mouth, chin, and jaw—yes, all three were very grim, and no mistake.”

Rochester is arrogant, as stubborn as Jane, proud, obnoxious, and manipulative. And yet? And yet he is an iconic hero in literature, and his type shows up in romances as the Alpha male (most recently as a Billionaire rather than a wealthy man with an estate). Since Edward Fairfax Rochester is such a memorable hero, it’s time to round up the Top 4 On-Screen portrayals of Rochester (I stuck with four because these are the ones I think of when I think of Rochester; other people mentioned the William Hurt portrayal, and then there’s Orson Welles hamming it up against Joan Fontaine, but those aren’t MY Rochesters):

Teddy Bear (a horrible title, by the way) is a Danish movie about a very shy bodybuilder finding true love in Thailand. It’s available for streaming from Amazon, free if you are an Amazon Prime member. Here’s the synopsis:

The 38-year-old bodybuilder Dennis would really like to find true love. He has never had a girlfriend and lives alone with his mother in a suburb of Copenhagen. When his uncle marries a girl from Thailand, Dennis decides to try his own luck on a trip to Pattaya, as it seems that love is easier to find in Thailand. He knows that his mother would never accept another woman in his life, so he lies and tells her that he is going to Germany. Dennis has never been out traveling before and the hectic Pattaya is a huge cultural shock for him. The intrusive Thai girls give big bruises to Dennis’ naive picture of what love should be like, and he is about to lose hope when he unexpectedly meets the Thai woman Toi.
It’s a really sweet movie, even though it sounds somewhat odd.